http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/s...ruption-charges-in-us.html?smid==tw-nytsports
The Justice Department has indicted several top FIFA officials as part of an investigation that alleges widespread corruption in soccer’s governing body over the past two decades, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The charges include wire fraud, racketeering and money laundering. They involve bids for World Cups as well as marketing and broadcast deals, according to three law enforcement officials with direct knowledge of the case. Prosecutors planned to unseal an indictment as early as Wednesday against more than 10 current and former soccer executives, the law enforcement officials said. Some of those being charged are living abroad and would face extradition to the United States.
The charges are a startling blow to FIFA, a multi-billion-dollar organization that governs the world’s most popular sport but has been beset by accusations of corruption and bribery for decades. The inquiry is also a major threat to Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s longtime president who is generally recognized as the most powerful person in sports, though officials said he was not charged. An election, seemingly pre-ordained to give him a fifth term as president, is scheduled for Friday.
The Justice Department was working with law enforcement agencies in Switzerland, where FIFA is based, to coordinate arrests. The investigation is based in the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn.
“We’re struck by just how long this went on for and how it touched nearly every part of what FIFA. did,” said a law enforcement official. “It just seemed to permeate every element of the federation and was just their way of doing business. It seems like this corruption was institutionalized.”
The case is the most significant yet for United States Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who took office last month. She previously served as the United States attorney in Brooklyn, where she supervised the FIFA investigation.
With more than $1.5 billion in reserves, FIFA is as much a global financial conglomerate as a sports organization. With countries around the world competing aggressively to win the bid to host the World Cup, Mr. Blatter has commanded the fealty of anyone who wanted a piece of that revenue stream. He and FIFA have weathered corruption controversies in the past, but none involved charges of federal crimes in United States court.
The case will further mar the reputation of FIFA’s leader, Mr. Blatter, who has for years acted as a de facto head of state. Politicians, star players, national soccer officials and global corporations that want their brands attached to the sport have long genuflected before him.
Critics of FIFA point to the lack of transparency regarding executive salaries and resource allocations for an organization that, by its own admission, had
revenue of $5.7 billion from 2011 to 2014. Policy decisions are also often taken without debate or explanation, and a small group of officials — known as the executive committee — operates with outsize power. FIFA has for years operated with little oversight and even less transparency. Alexandra Wrage, a governance consultant who once unsuccessfully attempted to help overhaul FIFA’s methods, famously labeled the organization “byzantine and impenetrable.”
No recent incident better encapsulated FIFA’s unusual power dynamic than the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments, which many observers found to be flawed from the start: the decision to award two tournaments at once, critics said, would invite vote-trading and other inducements.
Since only the 24 members of the executive committee would decide on the hosts, persuading even a few of them might be enough to swing the vote. Even before the vote took place, two committee members — Amos Adamu of
Nigeria and Reynald Temarii of Tahiti — were suspended after an investigation by The Sunday Times caught both men on tape asking for payments in exchange for their support. It was later revealed by England’s bid chief that four ExCo members had solicited bribes from him for their votes; one asked for $2.5 million, while another, Nicolas Leoz of Paraguay,
requested a knighthood.
As
new accounts of bribery continued to emerge — a whistleblower who worked for the Qatar bid team claimed that several African officials
were paid $1.5 million each to support Qatar — FIFA in 2012 started an investigation of the bid process. It was led by a former United States attorney, Michael J. Garcia, who spent nearly two years compiling a report. That report, however, has never been made public; instead, the top judge on the ethics committee, the German Hans-Joachim Eckert, released a summary of the report. In it, he declared that while violations of the code of ethics had occurred, they
had not affected the integrity of the vote.
Within hours, Garcia had criticised Eckert’s summary as incorrect and incomplete, charging that it contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts.” Nonetheless, FIFA
moved quickly to embrace the report’s absolution of the bid process. Qatar World Cup officials said the review had upheld “the integrity and quality of our bid,” and Russia’s sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, told reporters, “I hope we will not have talk about this again.”
Imagine how much crap has been swept under that big red carpet over the years!